A Response to Authority/Conscience

I would like to thank Steve for his thoughts about authority and conscience. Over the last few years, he and I have respectfully exchanged views on both subjects separately and together along with other members of MOJ. I plan to offer a few thoughts to his early posting today on the subject of “authority/conscience.”

It may well be that there are some folks who would follow the Magisterium regardless of what it teaches. I for one think that most people who know what the Magisterium teaches and follow it do so because they have thought about what the Magisterium teaches and they also think about views which are not consistent with those of the Magisterium on the topic before consideration. They follow the Magisterium not out of blindness but out of a well-formed conscience and right reason.

For what it’s worth, human beings have always lived in a complex world, but that does not make the moral choice complex if one thinks about what is at stake. If all moral choices are “complex,” then relativism will triumph—be it the relativism of the “mystery of life” passage from Casey or the relativism of the individual who insists that “I was only following orders.”

The moral law, if it is true to its identity and what is constitutive of it, must be objective. The exercise of conscience, which is always crucial to moral decision making, must also be objective. With due respect to those who assert that conscience is first and last a purely subjective matter, I cannot agree with their contention. This view reflects the problematic formulation of Casey that it is up to the individual to determine the meaning of life, the mystery of the universe, etc. If, indeed, this understanding is correct, then how, as I have argued or suggested in previous postings, is the conflict about any moral decision, great or small, that will inevitably emerge, to be resolved? I take no dispute with the issue that it is ultimately the voice of God, but how is God’s voice to be received and understood? If it is always by the individual and nothing more, then Casey wins and God loses. Why?

John Courtney Murray was on target when he mentioned that “the right to do what my conscience tells me to do, simply because my conscience tells me to do it” is a “perilous theory.” As Murray further explained, the particular peril of this approach “is subjectivism—the notion that, in the end, it is my conscience, and not the objective truth, which determines what is right or wrong, true or false.” I can imagine that each of us who contribute to MOJ could claim that God has revealed to her or him what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false without any other mediating influence. In this case, we could all claim to be right and true. But, what happens when our views to which we claim rightness and truth conflict with one another?

It is, as I have suggested, the voice of God that mediates, but it is not the voice of God as presented by the view of purely “personal revelation.” God’s voice is an outside authority, and so is the voice of Peter and his successors which are essential to the process of the proper exercise of conscience. Without both, my exercise of conscience is simply what I think or what I feel, and not much more. Making into God that which is not is idolatry, even when that is only my naked conscience and nothing more. The well-formed conscience, as I have previously stated [HERE and HERE], is something more. 

I again thank Steve for his interesting points and look forward to further discussion with him and others on this subject.     RJA sj